Joshua P. Mervine
Technical leader with over twenty years of experience. Currently focused on reliability, compliance, automation and tooling. Experience includes development leadership and architecture, process management and project management, application design and development, release process and automation and systems engineering. Strengths include communication, collaboration, problem solving, as well as mentoring and leading technical staff.
I want to create useful things for useful people, and in doing so help useful people become more useful.
Specialties
If you’re looking for all the buzz words or to have a discussion about algorithms, I’m probably not the right candidate for you. I specialize in learning what I need to know to solve the problem at hand.
That said, if you need the buzz words, here’s a few.
- Operating Systems: Ubuntu/Debian, CentOS, Redhat, etc.
- Languages: Ruby, Golang, JavaScript (Node.js and client), Python, etc.
- Applications/Tools: Kubernetes, Terraform, Docker, Git, Nginx, Splunk, etc.
- Development Processes: Agile/Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall; whatever fits for the team at hand and delivers.
Experience - Open Source Projects (a.k.a Nights and Weekends)
Over the last decade or so, I’ve worked quite actively on several open source projects, some by contract and some just for fun. Aside from the highlighted project below, have a ton of stuff on Github, as I use it as a bit of a scratch directory.
BootstrapCDN
BootstrapCDN is an open source web site, focused on easily and reliably deliver Bootstrap client design framework to the public in a free and open source capacity. I work closely with the developers of Bootstrap, Font Awesome and Bootswatch, delivering updates and site enhancements as necessary.
json2struct.mervine.net
json2struct.mervine.net is a small extension to github.com/ChimeraCoder/gojson that I created to bring a easy to use web interface to the project. Unlike many other side projects, it has gained some traction and sees a fair amount of use.
Experience - Day Job
Lead SRE, Observability - MuleSoft / Salesforce
February 2021 - Current
- Heavy focus on team bootstrapping, including hiring, long range planning and defining long term team vision.
- Company wide project migrating FedRAMP Moderate government logging infrastructure for all systems, services and applications.
- Developing Product Requirements and Engineering Plans for overhaul of the existing logging strategies to maximize coverage while minimizing costs.
- Providing hands on technical leadership and mentoring to geographically dispersed teams.
Sr. Manager, Production Services - Heroku / Salesforce
May 2017 - May 2021
- Hands on technical leadership, architecture and mentoring.
- Manage two separate teams, focused on Share Service Operations and Compliance and Integration development, respectively.
- Long range planning and project breakdown for underlying domain.
- Leadership Escalation Incident Command - https://blog.heroku.com/incident-response-at-heroku
Domains
- Shared Service Operations
- Owning and operating Splunk on AWS. Supporting 80TB (and growing) of data ingestion per day with zero down time, zero data loss requirements.
- Other various operational requirements, including; DNS, SSL and AWS Account management, alerting, monitoring, etc.
- Designing supporting infrastructure at scale for the various services and components owned and operated by SRE.
- Compliance and Integration Development
- HIPPA / PCI / SOX / etc. operational compliance and remediation.
- Developing and operating applications to support AWS account management, internal and third party service access control, automated on/off boarding and more.
Lead SRE - Heroku
May 2015 - May 2017
- Owning and operating Splunk on AWS. Supporting 60TB (and growing) of data ingestion per day with zero down time, zero data loss requirements.
- Building tooling to help developers who build tooling to help developers.
- HIPPA / PCI / SOX / etc. operational compliance and remediation.
- Other various operational requirements, including; DNS, SSL and AWS Account management, alerting, monitoring, etc.
- Designing supporting infrastructure at scale for the various services and components owned and operated by SRE.
- Incident Command - https://blog.heroku.com/incident-response-at-heroku
Site Reliability Architect - YP Holdings LLC
August 2014 – April 2015
Working as a bit of a “Swiss Army Knife”. This role was created for me so that I could aid Operations in employing development best practices, while assisting in cleaning up existing automation and designing and building additional automation for the future.
- Prototyping Docker based deployment processes and automation, in conjunction with MesOS.
- Implement continuous deployment best practices around git based configurations.
- Refactoring legacy automation, implementing development best practices, functional and unit tests.
- Mentoring junior engineers on development process and automation.
Associate Director of DevOps - YP Holdings LLC
May 2011 – August 2014
Managed a small team of elite engineers, focused on performance, stability, automation and release processes for YP.com (a top 50 trafficked site with over 30 million unique visitors monthly). Providing architectural input for Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, Node.js and surrounding technologies.
- Architected, implemented and released application platform for incremental move from Ruby on Rails to Node.js using Big IP F5, Nginx, Node’s cluster module, Express.js and node-http-proxy. Migration successfully released with zero downtime.
- Updated release process, reducing the overall deployment time by %75 and allowing for quick and reliable rollbacks.
- Established performance test automation and process, ensuring enchanted performance and higher confidence in releases.
- Work closely with developers, system engineering and network operation to ensure 99.9% uptime.
Team Manager of Operations - Walt Disney Parks & Resorts Online
January 2010 – May 2011
Managing seven Web Developers and Java Engineers, both on- and off-shore (India), responsible for maintaining disneyland.com, disneyparks.com and dozens of associated international sites in a high pressure 24/7 operations group. Working closely with Production, Quality Assurance, Systems Engineers and Business partners to ensure solid communication and processes, allowing for high quality code delivery with limited resourcing and short time lines.
Sr. Release Engineering Manager - EarthLink, Inc.
December 2006 – December 2009
Developing and implementing processes and procedures to streamline product life cycle from inception to release. Working closely with Development, Product Management, Quality Engineering, Change Management and Systems Engineering to ensure communication and expedite processes allowing for rapid development and release of new and existing products. Responsible for building and releasing over 50 web applications and 15 Windows client applications.
Sr. Development Tools Engineer - EarthLink, Inc.
July 2005 – November 2006
Conceptualized and built out a 130+ machine development data center. This was an 18 month project from start to finish, which resulted in a fully functioning parallel development environment allowing development to triple its overall productivity.
Manager of Portal Maintenance - EarthLink, Inc.
January 2002 – June 2005
Maintained relationship with Product Management, Quality Engineering and System Engineering, ensuring success throughout the product life cycle. Position required management of two engineers responsible for maintaining updates to customer facing production code bases for my.earthlink.net, EarthLink Website and many other supporting web properties.
Lead Engineer - EarthLink, Inc.
March 1998 – January 2002
Held progressively higher levels of responsibility as technical proficiency increased. Led and participated in major web projects associated with our customer portal and supporting products.
Intern - EarthLink, Inc.
June 1996 – September 1996
Researched and developed a teen focused sub-site of EarthLink’s main site; TeenZone. Duties included all HTML programming, copy-writing and interface layout. This site released and was a successful section of EarthLink’s early web content.